oh, those seamless segues.

S omebody mentioned this painting in comments a while back and I promised to dig it out of the files. I've scanned from a neat pre-press proof that DC sent with my returned artwork. It's from a Sandman Gallery one-off special, 1994 I think. It got a second view in the Vertigo calendar the following year, printed large and glossy. I was writing Hellblazer around that time, in a four parter with art by the excellent Sean Phillips that has never been collected for the bookshelf except in Italy in a very nice edition. I've never been entirely comfortable with the idea of Horror, by which I mean I don't understand why anybody would want to be horrified for the sake of entertainment, though the mighty Steve Bissette has patiently tried to explain it to me many times. I just remembered I drew From Hell for ten years. It occurs to me that the unusual tension in that book probably has something to do with me trying to take all the horror out of it.

Anyway, the king of dreams is shown here for my wee pal Stephanie Paule, aspiring artist who has been enjoying the Sandman books, though whether she enjoys seafood I cannot guess. After my two posts about the Ashgrove groper she felt inspired to send me a verse narrative on the subject of 'the nifty fingered cad', as she characterized him.
"You give a wink and like to think,
you break their darling hearts,
(But really all you do, my boy,
is grab their private parts)" (excerpt)
At the time when my likeness to the villain was pointed out with much hilarity, I wanted to go to the police station and give them my details for their database so that they could 'eliminate me from their enquiries', but the wife of my bosom put her foot down and forbade it. I was left wondering whether those around me are entirely convinced that I'm NOT the groper.

Speaking of aspiring young lady artists, this is from the world of animation, 1938:
Walt Disney co. rejection letter from June 7 1938
“Dear Miss Ford,
Your letter of recent date has been received in the Inking and Painting Department for reply.
Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men…” (link via Dirk Deppey)

Continuing my seamless segue, from the world of animation yesterday:
The Rabbi’s Cat - movie directed by Joann Sfar
“During this initial creative phase, I was invited to Studio 4C in Tokyo while Amer Béton was being produced. I was welcomed by my friends at Pixar who showed me their methods of working, writing and assembling teams. I also had an eye on the work of Marjane Satrapi whom I believe produced the first real graphic artist's film. To me, Persepolis is not an animated cartoon. Each scene of her story is invented; the language she uses is the complete opposite of what the animated world is used to. For her story, she invented the language that would best serve her purpose. Meanwhile, Sin City had just been released as an adaptation of Frank Miller's novel - a real film, with real actors, in which each image bears the mark of the artist who created it. I thought that movies were through with using cartoons. I was pleased to discover that cartoons were finally using movies. I think we are on the path to new dimensions where a whole new graphic language is invented for each new feature-length film. I am finally seeing new images appear as though they had come directly from the artist's pencil. Consider Kurosawa's watercolors or Fellini's drawings - many of their movies could have been drawings. I now think we can make a movie about The Rabbi's Cat that will resemble no other animation and after which the viewer can say “I saw a good movie”. I don't believe in continuing to distinguish novels from animated cartoons; I am not for separating animation and live action from all the rest. Animation is capable of treating the same real universal themes; it therefore must be subject to the same treatment, with the same requirements and the same guidelines for critique. " (link via Nathalie)

And while we're on the subject of artists blathering on and on, my endless run of interviews continues.
Publishers Weeekly, Comics Week -June 26- Campbell Unearths a Black Diamond, Part 1
Rave magazine: Tint Robot Monkey Comics Extra: Eddie Campbell.
“I think the American comic book is trying too hard to be like a movie and the movies are trying too hard to be like comic books. I think they’re interchangeable now. It’s no surprise to me that they would do 300 exactly like the book. The movies and comic books have met at 300. You can no longer talk about the strengths of either medium, they are now identical.”
I've bored myself.
Which is what we say in our house when we've started to explain something and then can't be bothered finishing it.